Druid movie

Hello, This is Dallas, Zu's creative director. Until Adam or Sean get on here and entertain you with some detailed copy of the Zu products, events, or history, I thought I'd at least tell you a little bit about the Druid short movie you see above.

Early 2006, Having recently purchased a Canon 1014 XLS Super 8 film camera off ebay, I set out to capture the Druid and showcase it's monolithic grandeur.At Zu we had occasionally tossed around the idea of doing an ad loosely based on the black monolith featured in Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey.I think we might have even had a still frame from the movie on Zu's early web site, the frame in the movie where the sun is rising over the top of the structure.I don't know if it was because of the monolith in 2001, but the Druid's shape has always embodied a simplified, other-worldy, mysticism that I thought would be fun (and somewhat of a challenge) to capture on film. Being an inanimate object, showing the Duid in time-lapse was my first idea to convey it's mystery in an interesting way. And it was also a good excuse to experiment with techniques that I had been inspired by in another film, Ron Fricke's Baraka.

When I got my first roll of film back from the developer, I realized two things. First, Film looks great! I've always noticed the quality of film while watching other peoples movies, but it really settled on me when watching some of my own footage. Second, I realized I didn't like waiting for the developing and the transfer of the film. To get an immediate idea of how the effect was going to work I shot some images with my digital still shot camera. And yes, without an intervolometer, this was interesting. It definitely took some patience, but it was still shorter than waiting 2 weeks for my film.I then loaded all the stills sequentially into Imovie, cut each frame down to 0:01 of a second, and to my surprise it didn't look too bad! I then made some graphics in photoshop (all frame by frame as well) put them together, and the Druid promotional movie was born.I haven't got an exact count as of yet, but there are over 2,600 individually photographed (or photoshopped) frames in this 2 minute and 41 second movie.

You'll notice there are two short video segments. One of which shows company co-founder, Sean Casey doing a live imitation (at my direction, not sure if he wanted to) of Zu's visual credo "Druid walking", or "have Druid, will travel"... anyway, still working on what to call that image.

As for the super 8 footage, It still looks a lot better, and I still have plans to release it, but that probably won't be for a few months.

The music is by producer a.vanvranken. If you like ambient, downtempo, or any IDM music, you should check out some of his other stuff.